Pacific Avenue (5 page)

I was so nervous, I didn’t know if I could even talk.
But I decided to say it as best I could. I glanced up, expecting to see her
still smiling, but she was peering into the oven with a harassed expression.

After lunch, I peeled chestnuts and sliced green beans.
A tent of noisy rain enveloped the house. Dad and I went out to the carport for
an armload of firewood. Some of the wood was damp, so we used some fat pine and
a few cones to get it going. The house began to smell like Thanksgiving, the
scent of roasting turkey blending with a whiff of smoke from the fireplace.

Dad and I sat on the carpet in front of the hearth and
played blackjack for matchsticks, the way he’d taught me when I was having
trouble with arithmetic in grade school. He brought out the nut bowl, a
cast-iron piece with a squirrel-shaped nutcracker attached. When I was little,
I’d named the squirrel Harry. Or maybe Hairy, because he wasn’t. When I was ten,
that had been hilarious.

“Here’s Hairy. Fuzzy Wuzzy wuzza bear,” he reminded me.

I gave him the smile he expected. Hairy made me think
of the time when Dad and I could talk to each other. I started picking through
the nuts, looking for the ones I liked. Hazelnuts, then pecans.

“You always grab the hazelnuts,” Dad mock-complained.
“What have you got against Brazils?”

“They taste like oil-soaked sawdust.”
Even if they
were good, I couldn’t eat one. Uncle Joseph always calls them “niggertoes.” I
hope he won’t say that today. Every time I see a Brazil nut, I feel ashamed. As
if it were me who’d said the word.

“Penny for your thoughts?” asked Dad.

“No sale.” I pulled my mind back to the present.
“They’re worth at least two. More than you can afford.”

“Ha. In that case I’ll have to win all the rest of your
matchsticks.”

“Not a chance.”

We played for a while longer. “Dad?”

“Mmmm?”

I felt nervous about asking him, too, but I made myself
go on this time. “Do you mind about Richard?”

“He’s a nice young man,” he answered. “We didn’t raise
you and Sharon to be prejudiced.” But he looked into the fire as he said it,
not at me.

“Does Mom mind?” I asked.

The doorbell rang. I ran and let Aunt Ruth and Uncle Joseph
in out of the rain. Right away, Aunt Ruth looked all around the living room and
craned her neck to peer through the arch into the dining room. She’d never done
that before. Whatever she expected to see, though, no one was there but Mom,
opening the gate-legged dining table out to its full, awkward length. She
glanced up from struggling with it.

“Come make yourself useful, Kathy. Come on in, Ruth.
Take off your coat and stay awhile.”

Mom flicked a linen cloth out and smoothed it over the
table like she was making a bed. She arranged candles around the china turkey
centerpiece, and I set the table—china, silverware, and wineglasses.

Aunt Ruth went into the kitchen and came out wearing
Mom’s extra apron. We fetched the cold food from the refrigerator and arranged
it like a magazine picture—salad, cranberry sauce, bread sticks, olives, and
pickles. Dad opened two bottles of burgundy and put them next to the salad.

The door opened, and Sharon came in with Sam, a
sweet-faced, redheaded man who carried a dripping cone of red roses and a
bottle of champagne. While Sharon was introducing him around, the doorbell rang
again. I opened the door to Richard and a spatter of rain. The wind pushed in
ahead of him as he hesitated on the porch.

He was carrying more flowers, white carnations. His
face was just as I’d imagined it when I was studying, except that a few
raindrops clung to his cheeks. I reached up and brushed them off before I led
him into the dining room.

Mom and Dad greeted Richard. The others took turns
shaking his hand while I introduced him. They looked him over.

What they saw was a tall young man in a gray suit a few
years out of style. His shirt was white. His narrow tie was navy blue. His skin
was brown. He stood almost at attention, but his face was open and vulnerable,
like a kid who’s hoping he won’t be chosen last for the team.

“Pleased to meet you,” said my uncle. “You a student at
Southern?”

“No, LSU. Kathy and I have a class together.”

Uncle Joseph frowned a little. He’d said more than once
that the black students ought to stay over at Southern. But he just asked,
“What’s your major?” the way he would ask any student.

“Engineering.”

I took the flowers into the kitchen to put in a bowl
for the sideboard. As I was arranging them, Richard’s and Sam’s together, the
rain hammered against the window as the wind turned to the north. I heard a
crash as one of our loose shutters banged against the house.

Someone in the dining room cried out, and I rushed in
to see what was wrong. One leaf of the table was collapsing, and dishes were
falling on the floor like an avalanche. Sam grabbed the leaf and wrestled it
back into place. Then Richard came crawling out from under the table. Sam
reached down and helped him stand.

Uncle Joseph, Aunt Ruth, Mom, and Dad stood as still as
automatons in a power failure. I was afraid someone would laugh, but the only
sound was from a bottle of wine gurgling a dark stain onto the carpet.

Sam’s eyes were sad as he faced Richard’s humiliation.

“’Nam?” he asked.

Richard nodded and turned away.

I took his hand and led him toward the bathroom so he
could clean the salad and cranberry sauce off his suit. As we left, I saw
Sharon bending to pick shards of the china turkey out of the mess.

After Richard shut the bathroom door, I went back to
the dining room, but I hesitated near the doorway. Sam stood near the
fireplace, while Uncle Joseph faced him from a few feet away.

“What in hell was that about?” demanded my uncle.

“Vietnam,” said Sam.

“What do you mean, ‘Vietnam’?”

“In battle, you learn to dive for cover when you hear
loud noises. Some people unlearn it slower than others.”

“Well, that’s no excuse! Not everyone who went to Vietnam
acts like that!” Uncle Joseph took a step toward Sam.

Sam didn’t back up and didn’t raise his voice.
“Certainly not my brother. He doesn’t act
any
way anymore. He died at Khe Sanh.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” my uncle said. “But that boy
didn’t have any reason to turn the table over!”

“Were you ever on a battlefield? You go to Korea?”

“No. I was too young.”

“You were lucky you never had to go to war.”

“So?”

“Looks like the war’s come to
you
now, doesn’t it?” Sam’s voice was cold.

Uncle Joseph abruptly turned away. He plunked himself
on the couch and grabbed a magazine. Flipping through pages too quickly to
read, he ignored Sam. There wasn’t anything he could say—Sam had hit the nail
on the head. Dad didn’t speak up either. He’d had rheumatic fever when he was
little, so he’d never even had to think about the draft.

When Richard returned, his apologies were politely
brushed aside and talk turned to a plane hijacking—last week’s news. The
conversation sounded like an amateur play. Mom brought the turkey and the other
hot food from the kitchen, and we gathered around the table. I was nearly in
tears. Richard sat silent beside me in his stained suit, his face smiling and
closed. I hoped no one else noticed he was trembling. We all bowed our heads
for Dad to say grace.

“Bless, O Lord, this food to our use and us to thy
service, and make us ever mindful of the needs of others. We ask in Jesus’s
name. Amen.”

“I would never gossip about one of my tenants,” said Marilu
Collins. Her bracelets clanked as she shuffled the cards. She had a slithery
gold cloth draped over the counter, and a couple of scented candles burning. I
didn’t know what she meant by “one of my tenants.” Kathy was the only tenant
she had.

“Of course not,” I assured her. Marilu wouldn’t
gossip—except six days a week and double on Sundays. “That’s not the kind of
thing I meant at all. I was thinking I’d like to call her family to get her
sizes, maybe her favorite color or something. You know, for Christmas.”

Anyone with a lick of sense would have seen right
through this rigmarole. But I figured it was good enough for present company. I
kept it sort of incoherent on purpose. At the very least, she’d cut me some
slack because I was a customer. That was why I was “consulting” her—even Marilu
might not have told me what I wanted to know if I’d turned up out of the blue,
asking questions.

“Oh, does your company give Christmas presents?” Marilu’s
question caught me by surprise. Here she was, supposed to know all, and she
didn’t know Mr. Giannini was the biggest tightwad in town?

“No, they don’t,” I said. Maybe I’d get an Academy
Award for this performance. I deserved one. “It’s for a personal gift. I like
Kathy.”

“I do too,” said Marilu. “I’m giving her a bead curtain
for her apartment.”

I hadn’t seen Kathy’s place, but I did not have her
figured for the bead curtain type. I had to fight off the giggles at the idea.
If Kathy lived in Marilu’s building long enough, she’d be up to her eyebrows in
wind chimes and incense burners. No way she could call the Sally Army to come
get the junk, either, not with The Mystic Eye herself right downstairs. I made
my face as blank as I could.

“That sounds cute. I know she’ll love it. Anyway, do
you have her folks’ address?” I asked. I wasn’t exactly being subtle, but
Marilu didn’t seem to catch on. She put the cards back down on the tablecloth.
For the moment, she gave up on her attempt to get me into a mystical frame of
mind.

“Well, I do check the mailboxes. Hers is right next to
the shop’s, and sometimes our mailman makes mistakes.”

“Mine does too.”

If you would go to hell for lying, my passage was about
booked. I quit feeling silly—the air came out of that balloon fast. I hated to
sneak, and every time I got involved with Kathy’s life, I ended up doing it.

“Oh, they’re awful,” said Marilu. “I sent a package
last month, organic herbs, and it arrived damaged. I had to send a replacement
for free.”

“I hope they don’t mislay my Christmas packages.” What
a conversation. Now we were commiserating about the Post Office. Well, whatever
it took. “Anyway, do you know her family’s address?”

“I’ll get it for you when I’ve finished your reading.
Concentrate on your question now. You have to give respect to the cards.”

I
was
concentrating—on keeping a straight face. Marilu laid out the cards in a cross
pattern with another line of cards alongside it. She gazed at the bright
pictures as fondly as if they were photos of her best friends.

“Here’s your central theme, in the first two cards.”
She turned one over. “It’s the justice card, reversed. You’re doing an
injustice, or you’re worried about one. When they’re upside down, they mean the
opposite.”

Good lord, and here I’d been sure this was something
silly I was going along with so I could pump her for the address. But that was
my big question in a nutshell: Was I doing a wrong or righting one?

“Here’s the five of cups. That’s regret, or disappointment.”

I hoped I wasn’t going to regret what I was doing this
minute. But maybe the oracle, or whatever it was, could see Kathy’s regrets. By
now, I had no doubt she had a good-sized inventory of those. What a mess.

Marilu kept turning over cards, analyzing each one in
turn. I could see meanings in some of them, not so much in others. It was like
finding shapes in the clouds. Maybe they were there, maybe you made them up. I
couldn’t decide if Marilu’s act was mumbo jumbo or not. I came away from the
reading no wiser about the future than before, and with twice as much trouble
in mind.

Because I came away with something else—an old address
of Kathy’s in Gretna, Louisiana. And with two more names and addresses: Sharon
Woodbridge Quinn in Baton Rouge—I guessed she’d be Kathy’s sister—and a Richard
Johnson, care of Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.